Posts by Craig Edwards

Mega-mortuary creaks open its doors in Westminster

death house

i, for one, welcome our new death house overlords... :-)

Security researchers show how to hook phishers

stupid phishers

Some phishers are REALLY stupid. For example they will put an ftp link in their phish email which contains the username and password!

From this its really easy to undo all their work.

Please don't leave me... bitch

willy-waving

firstly... facebook has ads?! Where? "Damn" that adblock. :)

secondly... it seems there are two types of willy-wavers in these comments, those that think they are superior due to the size of their contact list and those who think they are superior because they think only their opinion matters.

Grow up people!

Steve Fossett dead: Official

they can't tell us, its classified

I have a more plausible theory than aliens.

He wandered into restricted airspace north of las vegas and was shot down. This has been classified and the US government simply can't/won't tell us.

Suicidal moose descends on Alaska

fell off the mountain!

The moose fell off the huge mountain by the side of the seward highway! :)

http://brainbox.cc/pics/Alaska%202007/Seward%20Highway/index.php?large=DSC_1425.JPG

Spotted in the wild: Home router attack serves up counterfeit pages

changing admin password

Changing the admin password won't help you at all if you have your browser set to remember the username and password of your router...

Its as simple as putting a meta refresh to some 192.168.1.1 page in an external internet page, and boom, you'd be exploited.

Spam spewing printer attack pulps security

how this is done

This does not involve gaining full control of a users pc first.

Using javascript, you can determine the ip address of the workstation then portscan the subnet for open port 9100 addresses. Each one you find, send raw print data, then close the connection, out comes spam.

Trivial, and an annoying way for a spammer to waste your paper and toner.

Man uses mobe as modem, rings up £27k phone bill

data charges

Vodafone actually have something in their small print which states that your transfer is only 'free' up to a certain amount if and only if it is HTTP traffic on port 80. Anything else they bill you at full whack for. They are very quiet about this. I often use my phone for mobile IRC and got bitten by this a few times, luckily IRC is very low bandwidth and the bill was not expensive. Still, beware when you see 'unlimited'.

Vista sets 2007 land-speed record for copying and deleting

@ Get a Mac

Sure. I'll go out right now and buy a system that costs a lot more than my wintel system, has less features than my linux system, and lacks the ability to play 99.9% of windows games and has compilation issues with a lot of open source apps. Great idea! *passes coat to OS fanboys*

Facebook sued for mis-sending dirty texts

@ Blame the carriers

I have been receiving unsolicited text messages ever since i changed my number. It seems i am receiving someone elses spam. I enquired at the vodafone shop, and they told me there is a system in place to blacklist numbers and take them out of rotation for i think it was 6 months between users. Even though this happens, certain disreputable spammers will still continue sending texts to failed targets, which explains why most of the texts i get are from international sources advertising very dodgy websites. I was told there is nothing the phone company can do about these and they do not respond to 'STOP', so i may just get them to give me a new number. Surely this is a viable solution too?

Boffins uncover ginger gene in neanderthal DNA

ginger != blonde

Why are there so many people that confuse ginger and blonde?

Is colour blindness and stupidity also a gene, and can we disable it? :-)

L1NUX number plate roars onto eBay

number plates

I'd rather have the number plate FR33 BSD ;)

Portrait of an (alleged) cyber bully as a young man

victimless?

How exactly is a denial of service attack 'victimless'? Some poor sucker has to pay for the bandwidth, and it can be a very large amount of money.

Google malware watchdogs bite mom-and-pop shops

google toolbar

No, google's web search engine presents this malware warning when searching without the toolbar. You do not need the toolbar to come across this text.

Why Microsoft vs Mankind still matters

@ Damon Anderson

I believe the latest release of gnome is 2.20 not 2.2 (this is eighteen revisions later, not '2.2.0'). There are many ways to access removable media from the commandline the most notable being hald which works just like windows in that you insert the media and it becomes available immediately.

Gnome has changed a lot, it looks a lot nicer, its more user friendly, and its cleaner in terms of finding what you want. In theory i could run my system without resorting to the terminal but i would find this a hassle, after all i am a programmer and guis sometimes just slow me down, as they do most technically minded people.

As for KDE, i havent used it in many years.

As for wether or not gnome is actually ready for desktop use by every man and his dog in place of windows, i would have to say 'not yet'. However, I don't mind the fact that linux is still somewhat a minority operating system because while it remains in the shadow of more popular OSes, it will draw less attention from idiots who write viruses, malware, and exploits, keeping it the more secure alternative.

Comodo punts buffer overflow protection

two second check

I would guess that the only way to do this in two seconds is have a list of known processes and versions which are vulnerable to attacks, and walk the process list printing out 'hah you are vulnerable' if the said process is running.

'Mac worm' hacker in death threat farce

Virii

I believe the plural of virus is viruses. Where does the common use of 'virii' as a plural come from anyway?